After the gold rush: photos from Winnipeg’s interwar years

These photos serve to illustrate the city during a forgotten period of it history, between unbridled growth and optimism at the start of the century, and urban decline and mega-scaled hopes and interventions at the century's end. Read More

City & Politics, Planning

The East Exchange’s $10,000 question

This is a slow-growth town that is still deeply entrenched in suburban regulations, policy, and development patterns that need to change. Read More

City & Politics

Winnipeg and St. Boniface, 1962

There is a tendency to view the distant past as something that existed in black and white. Read More

City & Politics

Let it die: Why you should forget about the Albert

We'll all survive without the Albert. There are a number of new spaces across town, including the handful of remaining worn-out hotel dive bars, that are filling the void. Read More

City & Politics, Planning

What might have been: Art Deco at Portage and Main

The story of stagnation and decline that followed Winnipeg’s growth and ascendancy is a familiar one, if not always one clearly understood. Read More

City & Politics, Planning

Small zoning reforms could make a big difference

Under current City of Winnipeg zoning regulations, Wolseley is an illegal neighbourhood. Read More

City & Politics, History

Lost Winnipeg: Osborne Place

There's a forgotten short stretch of sidewalk in West Broadway, behind the Great-West Life Assurance Company headquarters. Read More

City & Politics

Discover Winnipeg through Jane’s Walk

Jane's Walk gives us a chance to observe the complexity and diversity of the neighbourhoods of our own city in new ways. Read More

Arts & Life

10 best places to get a beer in Winnipeg

There is no denying that Winnipeg has a lack of decent places to sit down with friends for a drink or two. This list, I think, drives that point home. Read More

Arts & Life

Why I still go to church

Like C.S. Lewis said, "I didn't go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that." Read More

City & Politics, Planning

Downtown buildings are more than the opposite of parking lots

There are four things buildings in an urban setting should do, and Winnipeg should strive for developments that, as often as possible, successfully do them all. Read More

City & Politics

My favourite place on earth

I'm ready for cooking breakfast lunch and dinner on the barbecue. Read More

City & Politics, Planning

A safer, less atomized downtown Winnipeg

Downtown Winnipeg is unsafe in some places and at some times. This is and always will be a rough town. But it's one where it's still possible to learn to live together and share the same spaces again. Read More

City & Politics, History

Lost Winnipeg: The Royal Alex

The citizenry of the young city anxiously awaited the hotel not only because of the addition of a "world class" hostelry, but because of the outdating and embarrassing blight that it would replace. Read More

City & Politics, History, Planning

When old neighbourhoods need to grow up

The irony is that the physical character of cherished central neighbourhoods are very much the expression of a lack of planning and the organic transition toward more compact forms between 1900 and 1930. Read More

City & Politics, Planning

Winnipeg doesn’t need a bigger convention centre

To the boosters and shills, the hope of an expanded convention centre as an economic catalyst is a quixotic faith in megaprojects. Read More